Brisbane, Dec 16 (The Conversation) Plastic has grown faster than any other industrial material in the last 65 years. Its cheap durability, initially an innovation, has become an environmental and public
health problem of global proportions.
Without an end-of-life strategy, the world is conducting an uncontrolled experiment, with plastic accumulating in poor countries, rivers, and throughout the ocean.
Plastic isn't manufactured in a neighbourhood. Often, it's not even produced within a single country. It depends on a gigantic international supply chain. So-called primary plastics—liquid or gaseous chemicals used to make plastic products—cross oceans to supply factories around the world.
Since the 1950s, when the first plastics emerged, the complexity and scale of this supply chain have only grown. Today, plastic is a global commodity, so ubiquitous that almost everything around us contains some piece of it. Look around you: it's easy to see why global demand for plastics more than tripled between 1991 and 2021.
Such a large increase in molecules synthesised in the laboratory—which do not exist in nature—would certainly bring challenges. Among them is the challenge of contaminating our own bodies and ecosystems.
In places with weaker regulations and/or institutional capacities – especially in countries of the Global South – these challenges transform into visible crises: plastics in the soil, in the water, on the streets, in fish, in breast milk.
Technological assessments and life cycle analyses show that, at all costs, we still do not have a truly efficient waste management system when it comes to plastic, not on the scale at which we have been producing, consuming, and discarding it, nor even considering broad scenarios of recycling and incineration.
The open veins of the plastic
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International trade has played (and continues to play) a central role in the plastics value chain worldwide. The plastics industry itself reflects this complexity and scale: leading companies in the sector often do not own their own factories—they rely on extensive networks of third-party manufacturers, usually located in countries with cheaper labour.
The result is a long, complex, and difficult-to-trace chain. For decades, international trade and the oil lobby have sustained the economic dependence on 140 plastic commodities.
Considering the highly interconnected nature of this chain, a Brazilian study conducted by us, the authors of this article, began to highlight the role of certain ports—restricted and delimited territories of international trade—in this chain.
Many global value chains—not just the plastics chain—pass through a few ports scattered around the world. This means that a large part of the power and control of these chains is concentrated in a few port companies at these border crossings.
Even when these companies assume some social and environmental responsibility, they rarely cover the full extent and complexity of the impacts generated. After all, supply chains enter and exit through ports, but spread throughout the world.
In most cases, these are multinational corporations with no commercial ties to the producers and consumers in the domestic part of the plastics supply chain.
The study proposes to investigate which ports, by functioning as funnels in this chain, are strategic points for the implementation of public policies to begin managing this crisis.
Therefore, considering the gradual—and truly intentional—reduction of the plastic supply chain as an environmental policy also means considering economic planning policies that impact the flows within its value chain.
It is a necessary orchestration (the planning of environmental policies alongside macroeconomic policies) and on a necessary scale (international), for policies that seriously seek, based on data, solutions to the climate and plastic crises.
The harmful growth in plastic production did not happen in isolation. It had—and continues to have—favourable trade agreements and incentives from governments around the world.
Because it is a refined petroleum product, plastic supply chains initially converge on oil extraction. In other words, the oil lobby, with its heavily subsidised activities, also discourages the development of more circular products and business models.
Redirecting these incentives could be a game-changer
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Investments in innovation and technology transfer for alternative, substitute, compostable, and biodegradable materials, in retail systems based on packaging reuse, can guide economies out of this crisis.
Along with tariffs on disposable or non-recyclable products, and fees on landfills and incineration, intervening in the "middle of the chain"—the midstream —is a turning point that has been overlooked, and it is where policies can act long before the plastic reaches the consumer.
Given the urgency, but also the complexity of the plastic crisis, the question cannot be whether or not to participate in the global oil supply chain. We cannot stop buying plastic in our daily choices.
The question on a collective scale is how to participate in a transition to new supply chains of plastic substitutes that also promote less disparity between economies.
Ultimately, it is not the end consumer in the South who should pay the price for a transition to other materials.
In studying this " how," we brought the port authorities to the table. This was so that, before we arrive at setting more refined operational goals, we could work with something applicable and testable today in the main ports of the supply chain.
The port midstream is strategic: it's territorially limited, computerised, and monitored. So why not start there?
Starting with the southern ports
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To even begin planning a way out of dependence on plastic, however, a two-dimensional perspective is essential—both to avoid a simplistic approach and one that disregards ongoing historical power imbalances.
First, the strategic vision. Some ports often influence the economies of entire regions and countries. And, therefore, they are also key players in environmental policies.
With this vision, port agencies assume the role of strategic partners for interventions in specific supply chains and specific regions.
Today, we talk a lot about solutions at the beginning of the chain ( upstream ) or at the end ( downstream ). But little about the middle—the midstream —where decisions can really have an impact.
The strategic dimension places the territorialization of policy at the centre of the analysis, and is based more on data about the volumes and values involved than on flags of broad or disconnected national territories.
Secondly, the vision of justice. Justice, whether distributive, environmental, or climate-related, has a common direction: it is directed towards the poorest, most vulnerable, and most at-risk.
Simply imposing tariffs on certain plastics in Northern ports will only further reduce purchasing power and access to services in the South, and therefore the quality of life for that population in general.
In this sense, environmental policies acting on value chains should highlight multiple possible forms of intervention directed at diverse economies, taking the North-South dichotomy only as a historical backdrop to be considered, but not generalizable.
Economies in the Global South need to invest in environmental and port agencies, research centres, and qualified professionals in order to participate in a transition that does not increase their inequalities.
Other initial results from the research at the Port of Santos break down these total flows into the most representative and strategic cargo codes, also considering the chemical processes involved in the manufacture of different types of plastics and connections with other sectors.
Other initial results from the research at the Port of Santos break down these total flows into the most representative and strategic cargo codes, also considering the chemical processes involved in the manufacture of different types of plastics and connections with other sectors.
More than presenting a standardized selection for all economies among the 140 types of inputs in the plastics chain and the plastics themselves, the scientific evidence provokes political discussion about targets for the gradual reduction of these plastic commodities, whose data are easily accessible on the 'World Integrated Trade Solution' portal, which operates with data from UNCOMTRADE - United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics Database.
Data on how plastics are traded internationally under 140 different names (including as waste) are in section 39, for all countries. The complexity of this analysis is an immense challenge.
However, presenting an initial package of international trade indicators at the time of the GPT negotiations is also a strategy of scientific diplomacy. And making this midstream of the chain visible helps to shift the current focus away from blaming the end consumer, or the inefficiency of collection, separation and recycling systems.
Without losing sight of these two dimensions—the strategic one and the one in favour of justice—the coordinated experimentation with this transitional pricing can (and should) begin.
The rapid and substantial influx of resources from this initiative, applied to selected ports worldwide, can supply specific funds earmarked for financing innovation in: new distribution systems with less waste and more reuse; the development of substitute materials in the packaging sector; or even the financing of the recovery of sacrifice zones already covered in plastic or emitting dioxins and furans.
Plastics are born from petroleum, a powerful lobby that blocks change. The "final act" of the oil lobby will only happen with strong international policies. Brazilian research, initiated in the Port of Santos, shows a path on an experimental basis: starting with the ports, a few, central, and powerful. They may be the turning points in some of our technological crises. (The Conversation) SKS
SKS
